An abysmal week of racism, cynicism and extremism

We are falling into the abyss so fast we barely realise that it's happening to us

Photo by Maan Limburg on Unsplash

Dreadful fucking week. Godforsaken. One of those weeks where you can feel it all slipping away from you.

When I first heard of the Nowak case, I knew instantly that it would concern a white victim and a dark skinned assailant. I didn’t know the details. I didn’t know anything about it. I just knew that it was being adopted as a political topic rather than existing purely as a crime story and therefore I knew, in my bones, that it would suit Reform. Why? Because those are the only moments which are turned into national conversations now. Moments which suit their narrative.

Last month, an Iranian man intervened to stop the anti-Jewish attack in Golders Green. “That is a Jewish guy, but I am living with them really,” he said. “They are in that flat - my family lived there. Most of them, Iranian and Jewish people, they have no problem.” This could have been a moment to celebrate the triumph of British multiculturalism, to lionise a man who stepped in to protect his neighbour, to contrast the triumph of diverse London life with the murderous insanity of those who would destroy it. But of course that would not fit the narrative, so it was barely covered.

In the tail end of last year, there were a series of physical and sexual assaults against Sikhs, all of which involved racial abuse. Two elderly Sikh taxi drivers were set upon outside Wolverhampton train station by assailants shouting racial slurs. A Sikh woman in Wallsall was raped while her assailant shouted Islamophobic abuse, wrongly believing her to be a Muslim. Another Sikh woman was raped in Oldbury while her assailants told her: “You don’t belong in this country”. This could have been a moment to acknowledge the poison that far-right politics has unleashed in this country and to ostracise those who spread it. But of course that did not fit the narrative either, so it too was barely covered.

When something does fit the Reform narrative, it will dominate the news for days on end. It will be elevated to a state-of-the-nation emergency. And that is what happened to us this week.

Henry Nowak was murdered by a Sikh man on the streets of Southampton. When police arrived, his assailant accused him of committing a racist assault. It was nighttime and he was wearing a dark coloured hoodie, so the officers could not see the stab wounds. He spent his last moments handcuffed under suspicion of racism.

It was a tragedy. But in journalism there are different kinds of tragedy. Some are considered isolated incidents without political ramifications. These are crime stories. And some are treated as indications of a wider political phenomenon. These are ultimately politics stories, which arise from criminal events. That is what happened with Henry Nowak.

We all know what happened next. The Nowak family said: “We don’t want Henry’s murder to be used to create further hatred, division or tension”. Reform leader Nigel Farage came out the next morning and called for people to respond with “pure cold rage”. The Nowak family said: “This is not a case about Sikhism. This is not a case about racism. This is a case about murder.” Farage said: “Proof, if ever there was any, that we’re living in a two-tier culture in this country, where the rights and privileges of white people matter less than those of ethnic minorities.”

Do you remember when these words did not exist? You don’t have to think too hard. It was in your lifetime. Every decade had its own grim way of discussing immigration - ‘bogus asylum seeker’ in the 90s, ‘Polish plumbers’ in the 2000s, ‘illegal immigrant’ in the 2020s. But we never really mentioned race. You never heard someone in mainstream politics come out and start talking about white people as a victim group, or go out of their way to specifically mention the ethnicity of an assailant. You never thought, when you first heard of a murder, that the race of the people involved would define the manner in which it was covered.

Not so long ago, it was basically unheard of for respectable people to talk about the white race in Britain. Now we hear it every day. We hear it all the time. Just a short while ago it sounded exotic, foreign, taboo. Now it sounds normal. We are disintegrating so quickly that just a few months ago we’d have been shocked by the things we now find commonplace.

Farage got his wish, of course. The thugs came out onto the streets of Southampton on Tuesday night. The usual culprits, utter cunts, streaming in from the train station, whipped up into a drunken frenzy by Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson.

At this point, it felt like perhaps Farage had crossed a line. There was a shift in the mood against him. He is usually very good at staying just on the right side of respectability. But this time he seemed to stumble, to get the mood wrong. During PMQs on Wednesday, he tried to claim the agenda again, deploying his favoured tool of warning about riots while in fact encouraging them. The whole Chamber turned against him. He seemed isolated, disgraced.

Some people began to conclude that things were looking up. Perhaps he finally crossed the line. Perhaps things would rebalance now. But that is to underestimate how bad things are and what this week revealed. It’s worse than we suppose. We are no longer witnessing the radicalisation of the British right. It has already taken place. What we are witnessing now is how a radicalised British right behaves. And that is not a story just about Farage. It is about his relationship with those who are more extreme, like Rupert Lowe, and those who are ostensibly less extreme, like Kemi Badenoch. It is about a poison which has infected British conservatism right down at the skeletal level.

Rupert Lowe is the most extreme MP who has sat in the House of Commons in the modern era. The Restore party, to Farage’s right, deals in explicitly ethno-nationalist rhetoric. Lowe’s campaign director Charlie Downes has said that “Britain is a people defined by indigenous British ancestry and Christian faith” and called for “an ethnically homogenous Christian Britain”.

The party plans to strip all refugees from the last ten years of their status and launch a mass deportation programme - including, it seems, of British citizens and residents. When he is attempting to sound moderate, Lowe insists that he has “never said we should deport whole communities”, but even in these instances he says he wants to deport “those arriving illegally, those living here illegally, those foreign criminals in our prisons… [and] those who are not contributing economically to our country”. That last category suggests that those who are here legally would be included in deportations. Given that the party associates Britishness with ethnicity, it is not hard to imagine who he’s talking about.

The party has attracted the UK’s various far-right groups into its fold. As a Hope Not Hate investigation found: “Restore Britain has attracted the extreme right like moths to a flame. We have… exposed figures linked to an array of fascist and neo-Nazi groups now active within Rupert Lowe MP’s party, including Blood & Honour, the British National Party, the National Front, the Homeland Party and more… Members of Patriotic Alternative (PA), the UK’s largest neo-Nazi group, were campaigning for Restore in the upcoming Makerfield by-election.”

The party is young but it is growing. Lowe is supported by Elon Musk on X.com, the far-right social media website. The algorithm and Musk’s personal interventions ensure he enjoys many millions of views, way more than Nigel Farage even though he has considerably fewer followers. The party has amassed a large membership. It may not be as large as the 130,000 it officially claims, but it is substantial. It has a sitting MP, around 30 councillors and at least 100 branches have held an inaugural meeting.

It is way too small to become a viable electoral force in Britain. Some on the left have therefore been foolish enough to welcome its presence, hoping that the percentage of votes it can peel off Reform will be enough to deprive Farage’s party of victory in knife-edge seats and perhaps even in Makerfield. But this is to confuse tactical triumph for strategic defeat, because Restore’s influence on Reform goes further than any one election result. It serves to poison our national life. It does to Farage what Farage does to the Tory party, dragging it remorselessly to the right.

Just a couple years back, Reform opposed mass deportation. Now it has a policy of going further than Donald Trump, with a goal of throwing two million people out the country.

You can see the same with Farage’s rhetoric. The Reform leader had tried to strike a more moderate tone recently, knowing that he has to attract a broad range of voters if he has any chance of getting to No.10. But his intervention this week showed that he is anxious about the loss of support on his right flank. This drove him to his statement on Tuesday morning.

Usually, Reform’s rightward drift also pulls the Conservative party to the right. Its mass deportation programme, for instance, was met by an unbelievably extreme and under-discussed Conservative policy of deporting 150,000 people a year - that’s three quarters of a million people over the course of the parliament.

This week, Badenoch adopted a different approach. She did not join Farage in using racial language. Instead she chose to attack him for it.

She wrote a piece in the Daily Mail which outlined her position. The murder of Henry Nowak was not just an isolated crime, she argued. Instead, it “must be a seminal moment for Britain on a par with the murder of Stephen Lawrence”. Farage was wrong to talk about white people being disadvantaged. He was using “the language of the Black Lives Matter movement in reverse – inflaming tensions, emphasising difference”. She had a different view. The police had been infiltrated by progressive diversity training. This, she suggested, is what lay behind their behaviour at the crime scene.

She rejected Black Lives Matter on the one hand and Nigel Farage’s White Lives Matter on the other. All lives mattered. This was a kind of racial centrism. Only the Tory party, she insisted, believes in “universalism, equality under the law, not treating people differently based on skin colour”.

She earned glowing reviews and led the national conversation. On the Good Morning Britain programme, the hosts listened in respectful silence as she spoke. In PMQs, her adoption of a broadly respectful tone allowed the Chamber to unite against Farage. Both the home secretary and the prime minister seemed to follow her lead, offering support to a proposed review of the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) anti-racism commitment. Former home secretary Jack Straw said there had been an “over-correction” in policing after the Lawrence murder. It was hard to find anyone willing to disagree with her.

There is nothing unacceptable about these views. They are just basic bog standard old school laissez-faire leave-things-be conservatism, with no curiosity about structural disadvantage and a suspicion of state interventions. Badenoch has held them consistently. It’s exactly what she used to say in government. What’s striking is that this is now considered the middle way.

When Badenoch promoted a report which suggested structural racism did not exist in 2021, she was lambasted for it. Labour’s then shadow equalities minister, Marsha de Cordova, called it “incoherent” and “ideologically motivated” and said it served to “downplay the role of institutional and structural racism”. A United Nations working group on people of African descent called it “an attempt to normalise white supremacy”.

It was recognised for what it was: a firmly right-wing political viewpoint which rejected the existence of structural racial disadvantage. Today, this view is the centre ground.

In just five years, the window of political opinion has moved so far right that what was once a classic conservative position is the centre and the left-wing view has simply been eradicated from national discourse. The language of Black Lives Matter - of solidarity, empathy and a demand for change - dominated Twitter and through it the TV and radio studios in 2021. Now the far-right dominates X.com and through it the TV and radio studios of 2026. Everything has changed.

We should not have to celebrate Badenoch for her refusal to encourage race riots. The fact that she did not follow Farage should be a basic goddamn expectation, not some kind of accomplishment. If we start to treat it as a victory of some sort we become our own undertakers, creating the narratives which will eventually bury us.

Badenoch is wrong about the murder. She is wrong on a basic foundational level about what kind of story it is. She is wrong about the implication. And she is wrong in her entire moral universe.

It’s worth repeating what Mark Nowak said: “This is not a case about Sikhism. This is not a case about racism. This is a case about murder.” That is the fundamental error in all this - the transference of a crime story into a politics story when there is no reason to elevate it to that position.

No-one seems to care about the details of the case because they are inconvenient, but here they are anyway. The judge said:

“The police were given a convincing but wholly false narrative of the incident. It was dark and Henry was wearing a dark top. The entry damage caused by the knife through it, would not have been obvious. Whilst there was visible blood on Henry, it would not have clearly been seen coming from that wound and the clearly visible facial wound was not life threatening. Henry was complaining that he had been stabbed and was struggling to breathe but that would not have necessarily told the officers how serious the situation had become. It is the experience of the criminal courts that sometimes, someone arrested and handcuffed will feign injury in the hope they may be released. These police officers were faced with having to make quick decisions in pressurised circumstances about the best way to act. The genuine shock to the particular police officer, when he realised that he had been giving CPR to Henry when he had a serious chest wound, tends to show that he was doing his best in a very difficult situation.”

I’m not going to pretend those officers covered themselves in glory. But is this really the kind of case on which we are going to make deep and far-reaching changes to policing in Britain? Are we really certain, on the basis of a period spanning a few minutes - in the dark, amid contested claims and confusion - that this event justifies fundamental alterations to our institutional approach to race relations?

How many calls are there to the police about racial assault every day which are true? How many cases are there of people being arrested who say they have been attacked when it is false?

Badenoch’s core political point is effectively that there is no longer a racism problem in the police force. That is false. A report in autumn 2024 by the Independent Office for Police Conduct, an independent statutory body, found that “black communities in particular feel over-policed as suspects and under-protected as victims”. This is due to the “disproportionate use of police powers, such as stop and search and use of force”. It found “clear evidence… that these systemic problems still exist”.

A Ministry of Justice Ethnicity and the Criminal Justice System report published in November 2025 compiled statistics from data sources across the criminal justice system to assess the typical experiences of different ethnic groups. It found that ethnic minorities “appear to be over-represented at many stages throughout the criminal justice system compared with the white ethnic group... The greatest disparity appears at the point of stop and search, custodial remands and prison population.” Asian, black and mixed-ethnicity groups received “longer median custodial sentences than white offenders” when it came to drug offences.

A Guardian report this morning found that police officers in Hampshire, the county where the Nowak murder took place, were 5.1 times more likely to stop and search a black person than a white person. Across the rest of the country, they are 3.8 times more likely to stop and search a black person than a white person. But sure. Two-tier policing. Don’t white people have a terrible time of it.

It is simply not the case that racism - systematic or otherwise - has been eradicated from the police, or indeed from many other parts of society. It is simply not the case that racism has ceased to exist. Indeed, our national conversation barely scratches the surface of it. How often do you see British Chinese on television, for instance? What proportion of light-skinned Asians do you see represented compared to dark-skinned Asians? How many Afro-Caribbeans are there at board level? The Badenoch view is to simply close our eyes, pretend it isn’t happening, eradicate any effort to deal with it, and call it universalism.

It is not universalism. True universalism comes from making sure that everyone has the same chance in life. And that does not involve saying that you’re colour-blind and patting yourself on the back for it. It involves searching for injustice and discrimination and eradicating it. Sometimes it involves addressing racism or sexism in an institution. Sometimes it will involve a more active effort to undermine disparity in access. This is how we strive for equality: through working for it, not pretending it already happened, when it patently has not.

Also: The gall of it. The sheer fucking gall. Your non-white friends will tell you how it is now. They’ve watched as the ugly snarling things emerge from the cracks in the pavement. They’ve gazed on as Tommy Robinson marches flood central London. As racist abuse is again heard on the street, just like it was in the 70s. As the extreme right begins to display a swagger it has not had for decades. The absolute bloody gall to see that and say: racism isn’t really a problem anymore, we can scrap all those inclusion programmes now, they’re divisive. It’s downright Orwellian - the party telling you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.

The sneaky obscenity in Badenoch’s contribution lay in the comparison of Farage’s rhetoric with Black Lives Matter, as if they were moral equivalents. Black Lives Matters was an anti-racist movement, fighting to reverse decades of discrimination. It should not be mentioned in the same breath as Farage’s crybaby fantasies of white victimhood.

It was no paradise in 2020. At the time it felt pretty shitty. We’d just left the EU, Boris Johnson was in charge, the Tory government was busy wrecking the country, anyone who believed in a political perspective to the left of Ghengis Khan was labelled a ‘woke snowflake’. But back then, precious few people on the right would have dared to compare Black Lives Matter with white nationalism, which is effectively what Badenoch has done. Precious few dared to respond by saying ‘all lives matter’, which is effectively what Badenoch has said.

And yet that, today, is the centrist position. It is the supposedly reasonable middle ground. Further to the right, from the party which is still topping the polls, we have an incitement to riot. And to the right of that we have a grab-bag of fascists and ethno-nationalists supported by the richest man in the world.

We are in the fucking abyss and we are sinking so fast we barely notice how rapidly things are changing. It’s so bad that weeks like this, when things are said that sound like they’re from the Weimar Republic, are somehow taken as victories because they did not result in total moral collapse. We have quite literally reached the point where we breathe a sigh of relief when the leader of the Conservative party does not join calls for white riots.

The rightward drift in this country is now a state of emergency. It is violent. It is racist. It is motivated by some of the very worst instincts in the political condition. The first step in combating it is to treat it as the moral indignation it is, rather than another run-of-the-mill day in British political life.

The alarm bells are sounding. If we do not respond to them soon we will fall so far that it is hard to picture us emerging from the darkness.

Odds and sods

You can listen to this newsletter as a podcast at the top of the page or on Spotify. You can follow me on BlueSky, Instagram or TikTok.

My column for the i paper this week was on Farage’s intervention in the Nowak case. I was also on Cross Questions on LBC on Tuesday night, which you can watch in full below by skipping to the one hour mark - or there’s a clip here and here.

Origin Story this week is on the history of Evangelical Christianity, a once proud religious movement which has degenerated, in the US at least, into supporting everything it once claimed to object to. Swearing, a decline in moral standards, serial fornication, materialism, and perving on your own daughter - all absolutely OK now with evangelicals apparently. It’s a very strange story, with a motley cast of characters: John Wesley, Dwight Moody, Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell (”if you gave him an enema you could bury him in a matchbox”) and Pat Roberston. You can access it wherever you get your podcasts or just watch it below.

I watched Quartet in Autumn at the Arcola Theatre this week and found it very beautiful indeed. Adapted by Samantha Harvey from the novel by Barbara Pym, it tells the story of four colleagues in London as they approach retirement. There is a lot that is profound in there about aging, loneliness and friendship. I laughed and felt deeply sad throughout. The whole thing is a triumph.

Most of all, it made me think of the sadness of colleagues. I don’t mean the people you meet at work and become firm friends with. They stay with you. I mean the people you always liked, but it was never going to last after you stopped working together. Or those friendships you have at work that are about the enjoyment of working with someone. Later, you go for a meal and you catch up and you sit across a table from each other and it simply isn’t the same. The friendship was about the doing, not the regaling. It cannot survive in any other context.

Anyway, it really is very lovely indeed and you’ve a couple weeks before it ends.

Right that’s your lot, you can fuck off mate. See you next week.